All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this morning. If you're joining us online, we're so glad you're doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. And I'm excited for this morning. And I know this section of the church here, that your general mentality is, yeah, the good part's over, so let's go, buddy. I'll try, okay? I'll try. I've got a lot to cover. I've got to see how adroitly I can move through all of the points and the stories in Moses' life, but we're going to drive to one large point today that I want us to see. This is the first Sunday in our summer-long series on the life of Moses. I think, what's it called? The Life and Journey of Moses. Wonderful. I tell the graphics department, which is Aaron and Carly, that this is what I'm going to preach about, and then they come up with the titles. So I never know what the series is called. We're going to spend 14 weeks in the life of Moses. And the reason we're going to do this is last year, I sat down with the staff and I wrote out all the books of the Bible and all the major characters of the Bible. And then we looked at the last five years worth of series and said, what are the gaps? What are the things that we haven't spent time on that we need to spend time on? And one of the most glaring ones was the life of Moses. And because of how impactful it is and how important it is in scripture. So this morning, rather than settling in on any particular instance in the life of Moses, I want to look at a bunch of them because I believe that they elicit a question. And just for the record, just so we know, Owen won the baptism contest. He did. He nailed it. That was great. I want us to move, we're going to do an overview of the life of Moses, move through and just kind of hit on different instances because Moses' life, more than any other life in the Bible, in my belief, more than any other account in the Bible, elicits a question more than any other story, more than any other person, more than any other life. You could say that Joseph is close, Moses' predecessor. You could say that David is close, but I don't think there's any other life in the Bible that elicits this question this much and kind of defines the story of Moses, which is simply this. God, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? What's going on right now? As we go through the life of Moses, you'll see this pop up again and again. God, I don't understand what you're doing right now. And in this way, I believe we can all relate to Moses because we have all at times asked that question, God, what are you doing? What's going on? I don't understand. When something's going wrong with our children and we don't know how to fix it, God, what are you doing? When someone gets sick and they aren't healed and we love them so much and they're so young, God, what are you doing? When there's big instances that happen, the big calamitous things that happen over and over again, it seems in the news, when wars happen, we say, God, this is not how I would do this. Like, God, what are you doing? When we're trying really hard to be parents and have a baby and we can't, God, what are you doing? And then when you miscarry a baby, God, what are you doing? And so I think many of us, if not all of us, have had a moment and probably a lot more than that in our life where we ask the fundamental question of the life of Moses, God, what are you doing? So what I want to do this morning is show you what I'm talking about. Show you these different instances where Moses or the nation or the people around Moses couldn't help but throw up their hands and say, God, why is this happening? What are you doing? What is going on? And we start it right out of the gate. If you have notes, you just have a list of scriptures on that note. So you can kind of see where I'm going to go. There's not a lot of blanks to fill in this morning, but you'll have the references and you can scratch the instances next to them if you want to, because I'm going to go through these and then I'm going to show you kind of what I believe is the point of all of these things. But right out of the gate, we see this verse, these verses in Exodus chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. So here's the context of this mama putting a baby in a basket and floating that basket down the river. The Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, somewhere between, scholars think it's somewhere between 200 and 400 years earlier, settled into Egypt. Because Joseph, one of the sons of Israel, Jacob, who was to become Israel, Abraham's grandson, ended up moving down to Egypt. It's a whole big thing, but he got in a position of big power. And because of his power and because of famine in the land, his family, his brothers, who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, moved down there too and settled in the land of Goshen, which is part of the land of Egypt. Then you fast forward. You turn the page from Genesis, which tells that story, among some others, but spends most of his time there. You turn the page from Genesis, and you get to Exodus. And in Exodus, what's going on is those Israelites have been there for generations. And the pharaohs that were favorable to them have gone, and there's new pharaohs. And now they're so numerous that the pharaoh at the time is worried that they would become so strong that they would be able to overtake the Egyptians and escape, and they wouldn't have their workforce anymore. So he tells the midwives, the Egyptian nurses that help with deliveries, if a woman has a girl, let the girl live. If the woman has a boy, take the boy's life to cut the male population of the Hebrew people. Well, Moses' mom was able to have him before the midwives got there. And so she was then hiding him, loving him, weaning him, caring for him. And eventually he started making too much noise as kids are wont to do. It did not take my kids three months to make too much noise, I'll tell you that. Eventually he started making too much noise and she realizes they're gonna find out about him and to come take him from me, and they're going to kill him. So the only thing she could do to save his life is put that baby in a basket and float that basket down the river. Just as an aside, I've preached a whole sermon about this on Mother's Day because I think that's what parenthood is. At the end of the day, you put your child in the basket, and you float it down the river, and you trust it to God, right? So she does that. And I can't help but think and be rather certain that during that season and during that time, with this is the kind of the real picture of it, not the personification of it, but a microcosm of it is, God, what are you doing right now? Why are you letting them kill our sons? God, why do I have to float my son down a river? So even Moses's life before he's even cognitive of what's happening around him starts with this question, God, what are you doing? Then we fast forward and we go to Exodus 2, 23 and 25. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. Preceding this verse, in the second half of chapter 2, is the account of the time that Moses came out of, I assume, the palace and was moving through the city, and he saw two Egyptian guards beating some Hebrew people. And he was inflamed with anger, and he went to protect them, and he ended up murdering these two guards. And this was seen by other people. And they reported him to the Egyptian guards. So now there's a price on his head and they're trying to actively arrest and kill Moses. So Moses has to flee. And he ends up fleeing to a place called Midian which was far enough away for him to not have to worry about the law anymore trying to get him. And he falls in with a guy named Jethro who has seven daughters. He marries one of the daughters, Zipporah, and he becomes a shepherd for 40 years. He's in the desert. Far away from the life that he had built and from the people that he knew. He had to flee. And at the end of this fleeing, the people cry out to God, what are you doing? What's going on with this slavery? And I can't help but wonder, this is speculation, you go here with me if you want to, but I can't help but wonder if they thought we had one voice in the palace that could advocate for us that Pharaoh might be sympathetic towards, and now he's just made a mistake and he's gone out into the wilderness. God, what are we doing? Who's going to save us? This is too much. This is too oppressive. And it says God heard their groanings and remembered his covenant with Abraham. Then very quickly in the narrative, we move to the next big scene in Moses's life, which is Moses and the burning bush. That's in Exodus three and four, two of, I think the best chapters in the Old Testament. And I'm not going to belabor this story because we're going to spend the next two weeks in that story. But Moses is in the desert. He's a shepherd. He's tending to his sheep. And he looks over and there's a bush that's on fire and it's not diminishing. And so he wanders over to check it out and the fire says to him, you're on holy ground, take off your shoes. And he's like, oh, this is God. And God says to him, I want you to go to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the known universe, and tell him to let his free workforce go. That's what he says. I want you to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. And so they have a back and forth. And we're going to get into this back and forth next week with Moses' five excuses that I think are pretty great. But the one that I think is most interesting and kind of most indicative of his struggle is in chapter 4, verse 10, where it says, Moses said to the Lord, pardon your servant, Lord.. And Moses says, but why me? I'm not eloquent. I never have been. I'm not silver-tongued. And beyond that, I just spent 40 years talking to sheep in the desert every day. And when he says I'm slow of speech and tongue, there are some Hebrew scholars that believe that that is indicative of a speech impediment, that he could have possibly had a stutter or something that would cause him to speak slowly and unevenly. He was not the man to go have political negotiations with the most powerful leader on the planet. So he says, why me, God? I'm slow of speech and of tongue. And God's response, if you read on, is, I will be adequate for you. I don't need you to be adequate. I will be adequate for you, so go. But it's like, then the question, and in the five excuses, God, what are you doing? You've got the wrong guy. Who's sending me? Well, I am sending you. Who should I say sent me? And God says, I'm not going to tell you my name. Why? What are you doing? He says, no one's going to trust me. And he said, I'll make them. Why? What are you doing? Every excuse is, God, what are you doing? But he goes faithfully, and he goes to Pharaoh, and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no chance. And then we have the famous ten plagues, right? The frogs and the locusts and the blood and the boils and all the things. We have the famous 10 plagues. And now we don't know how long of a period of time the plagues cover. Was there one a day for 10 days? Was there one a week for 10 weeks? It could have been months or maybe even years. There's not a lot of information to tell us what the span of time was during the plagues. But you've got to think that by the time they got to the 10th one, the growing question in everyone's brain was, God, what are you doing? These plagues ain't working, man. Pharaoh's not budging. God, what are you doing? And then the last one is, hey, I'm going to send the angel of death over the camp. And everyone who doesn't do a certain thing is going to lose their firstborn son. We see this in chapter 11, verse 1. Now the Lord said to Moses, I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here. One is, hey, the plagues aren't really working. So like what's going on, God? What's happening right now? And then the other one is, hey, what I want you to do for this particular plague to save your firstborn son is I wanted you to take the blood of a lamb, of a splatless lamb, and I want you to paint it on the doorposts of your house. And when the angel of death sees that perfect blood on the doorposts of your house, he will pass over, which is where we get the holiday Passover, he will pass over your house and move on to the next one. And I can't help but think that as Phil Leverett as the dad is out there the afternoon before Passover with the fresh blood from the lamb that he probably borrowed from Cam, that he's taking the blood of the lamb and putting it on his doorpost and saying, God, what are we doing? This doesn't make any sense. But okay, if this is what I have to do. The angel of death comes. There was great weeping and wailing in Egypt that night. The cry was great. And sure enough, Pharaoh drives them out. Says, okay, get out of here. You're a curse on our nation. Get lost. And here's a funny little detail from this story that I don't know if I'll be able to point out again. But all the housekeepers, all the women in Israel who were housekeepers of the rich Egyptian social class or whatever, they knew that they were going to be leaving the next day. So on their last day at work, they pilfered the Egyptians. And the Bible says, and so they plundered them. They took all their gold and all their silver. They just grabbed it all, put it in their dresses, and went home. And so they had some extra nickels on the trip to Israel. And I think that's funny. So they leave. They're driven out. They're in the desert. They've made their escape. And then they get pinned up against the banks of the Red Sea. And they cry out again. As Pharaoh approaches in chapter 14, verse 10, as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves? I love this sarcasm. Was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? So they're on the banks of the Red Sea. They have a choice to drown or to be slaughtered by Pharaoh's encroaching army. And they're bearing down on them. And they cry out and they look at Moses and they say, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? Did you bring us here because there's not enough graves in Egypt. Is that why you did this? Is that why you did all the plagues and all the things so that you could bring us here to die? What in the world, God, this doesn't make any sense. God, what are you doing? And then we know that God parts the Red Sea. They run through and the army is crushed, but they don't know that. So they're saying, what's going on? They're groaning. Why did you bring us here to die? It doesn't make any sense. But they get through. And they go. And then they're in the desert. And as they're in the desert, they're hungry. Because there's not much to eat. And there are, scholars will tell you that there were probably between 200,000 and 500,000 people moving through the desert. That's a logistic nightmare to feed. And so they're hungry. And they're calling out to God. And I can just imagine being a father watching my children be hungry every day, not sure if I was going to be able to get them food. And watching my wife sacrifice her food for them. I can only imagine how angry I would be. And how sad I would be. And how my sentiment would be, God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us out into the desert to starve? And so they cried out to God. And they complained to Moses and Aaron, and this in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I and the Lord your God. This is the genesis of manna, something that we probably have heard of before. And he says, tonight I'm going to let you eat quail. It's going to be a feast. But here's the deal. Don't get any more than you can eat. It's like when you take your kid to a buffet. Only get what you know you can eat. And their eyes get real big and you've got to try to figure it out. Only get what you know you can eat. Thank you for laughing at that joke. And then he said, the next morning there's going to be bread. But same rules apply. Don't store it. Don't be greedy. Only get what you need for that day. And so the next morning they wake up and there's these white flakes on the ground and they're like, what in the world is this? And they call it, and that's what manna means. What is it? And Moses says, that's the bread that the Lord has provided. God, what are you doing? We're hungry and we're starving. And why is it this weird bread that we can only take just enough of for the day? What's the harm in stockpiling bread? This doesn't make any sense, God. Why? What are you doing? Then they near the end of their journey in the desert. They're on the banks of the Jordan River. They're looking across the Jordan River at the promised land where Abraham lived and where Israel and his sons migrated from down into Egypt. And now, hundreds of years later, they've returned to claim their promised land. This is the land of milk and honey. The problem is there are now other peoples and tribes that occupy that land. And so Moses and Aaron collected 12 spies and sent them across the Jordan River. And they said, go scout the place out. Let's go figure out what we're dealing with and figure out how to conquer this territory because they knew they were going to have to conquer it. They couldn't just go to them and be like, hey, listen, there's been a big mistake. This is actually ours. So that's not going to work. So they're going to have to war over it. So they send the spies, and then the spies come back with this report in Numbers chapter 13, verses 26 through 29. They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the desert of Paran. There they reported to them and the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. They gave Moses this account. We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey. Here's its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in Negev, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan. I just want to say, I dare any of you guys to read those words out loud like that. I had to practice this morning. Thank you, Lord. One of the things that's interesting there is if you read below in the text, the sons of Anak were known to be descendants of giants. And so they were much larger men than the Hebrew people were. And so they come back and they go, yeah, that's the land of milk and honey. Here's the fruit. It's pretty amazing. God was right. He did a good job picking a good plot of land. The problem is there's powerful armies and powerful fortified cities and we can't go. God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us here to a promised land that we're supposed to take over that we've been journeying through the desert waiting on for 40 years now. And we can't even occupy the land because we don't have the strength to do it. God, what are you doing? Now, here's what I want to do. I'm going to go back through them very quickly. All of those instances where they said, God, what are you doing? And I'm going to tell you based on scripture, what God was doing. I'm going to tell you what I think he was up to, because I want us to see a much larger point. You go back to the very first instance of his mom floating that basket down the river. God, what are you doing? Well, I'll tell you what he's doing. He knows that Moses is going to be the first leader of his people that has to install civics and laws and leadership and war and generalizing and trade and negotiations. And there is nobody in the Hebrew community that has ever had any experience at that at all. So what does he do? He takes the future leader and he plants him right in the middle of the palace of the most powerful person in the world and gives him access to the greatest education in the world and gives him access to all the kinds of conversations that country leadership is going to require of him that he would have never had access to if he had stayed amongst the Hebrew people. So he was, God sent him to the palace, I believe with my whole heart, to be trained in a unique way that nobody else could. Then after he gets trained, okay, I'm ready, he murders two people and he gets sent out to the desert. And he stays in the desert for 40 years. God, what are you doing? You trained me up. I have to have a larger purpose than this. Moses doesn't know what he's been trained for yet, but I'm sure that he had an idea of his life that wasn't to flee everything that I know and the opulence of the palace and all the conveniences of life that I experience as this privileged kind of Egyptian Hebrew person. God, why am I here? Well, Moses had to be humbled. This happens over and over again in scripture. God calls Paul. Paul goes to the wilderness for seven years. God calls David to be king. David's on the run for 20 years being humbled. He calls Joseph to be the leader under the Egyptian people. Joseph is a prisoner for 20 years. It happens over and over and over again. And all of those times are instances of God humbling and shaping the character of the person that he intends to use, shaving off the rough edges. Clearly Moses was a hothead. He murdered two dudes. Clearly he didn't have the patience and the grace and the diplomacy to be a leader of a nation. And so God sent him to the desert to be molded and shaped and humbled. Then he calls Moses. And Moses says, you got the wrong guy. What are you doing? I stutter. And God says, hey, listen, you need to learn to depend on my adequacy, not your inadequacy. You're right. You are inadequate for the task. You are not the obvious choice. But I'm choosing you because, and you need to know right now, there's going to be a lot more instances where you're going to be inadequate for the task. And you're going to have to trust on my adequacy. He's teaching Moses to trust him. Then he goes to Pharaoh. And he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no. And then they have the plaguesagues and we go, what is going on with this? God, they're not working. And the last one works. And it's, they had to be saying, God, why this plague? This is pretty rough. This is pretty brutal. And why are you having me paint the blood of a lamb on a doorpost? I'll tell you why. Because if you were to go home right now and you were to take, let's just say Bayer, not like blood and, or DuPont, whatever your choice is, I don't care. And you took that and you were just painting a strip of it on the doorpost. You'd put it in the middle and you'd put it on the sides at about shoulder height. That's the perfect blood of a lamb in the shape of a cross. And by that blood, I will protect your firstborn son. Because God knows 4,000 years later, his firstborn son is going to hang on the cross and shed the blood of a perfect lamb. And by that blood, our firstborn sons are saved and all people are saved for all of time. It's a picture of what God is going to do there. He frees the people. They're at the banks of the Red Sea. God, what are you doing? Did you bring us out here to die? Are there not enough graves in Egypt? He parks the Red Sea. He runs them through it. He knew that Pharaoh and his anger and his frustration and his haste would trudge through the middle of the Red Sea too. And then he collapses the waters on the most powerful army in the world, ending the existential threat to his people. And they get through and they're hungry. Why did you bring us here if you're not going to feed us? So he says, I'm going to give you bread, but you can only take enough for each day. You can't be greedy with it. Why? Because Jesus is the bread of life. And 4,000 years later, he's going to come and live a perfect life and die a perfect death. And he's going to be sufficient for us. He's going to be all we need. We will never hunger or thirst again. Manna is a picture of Jesus and an assurance of God's provision for his people. And that's what he wants us to learn from it. Finally, they're at the banks of the Jordan River. They're about to approach the promised land. And they check it out. They can't do it. Ten of the spies said, no go. But Joshua and Caleb were men of faith. And they said, if this is where God wants us to go, we can. And they led the armies through Canaan under the power of God, conquering their way all the way through what we know of as Israel. And they settled in the promised land. And it's a picture of our promised land where we will ultimately go after our life's journey. And it is impossible for us to get there on their own, but through the power and the provision of God, he's made a way for all of us to enter that promised land. Do you understand that every instance in the life of Moses and what happens with the Hebrew people is an opportunity for God to show his sovereignty and his goodness. Here's what I want you to see from that. This one thing, this one assurance that I want us to keep locked in as we go through this series. God knew what he was doing then and he knows what he's doing now. God knew in every instance when they said, God, what are you doing? God knew. He rarely explained himself, but God knew. And he knew then what he was going to do, and he knows now what he's going to do. He knew their story when they didn't. And they said, God, why are you writing it this way? And he just thought, one day you'll see. You all have things in your life where you go, God, what are you doing? Why is this happening? And let me just tell you, God knows now why it's happening. And you might know later. But God knows now. We don't know. These wonderful kids that we baptize and these great families, we don't know where they're going to go. But God does. So there's going to be hardships in their life, and they're going to cause us to cry as parents and grandparents. And we're going to go, God, what are you doing? He knows now what he's doing. He knows then and he knows right now. So my hope as we go through this life of Moses, which puts on marvelous display the assuring and comforting sovereignty of God. My hope is that as we go through it, we'll see over and over again that God knew what was going on. God knew what he needed, and he's not just thinking generationally, he's thinking millennially. I don't know what's happening in your life. I don't know what stories he will write with you, but God does, and the story of Moses helps us to see that we can trust him. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your sovereignty. Thank you for our ability to rest in it if we would so choose. Thank you for the way that you weave the story of Moses and the Israelites and how you looked after them as a heavenly father in a way that you look after us. God, for those of us who are in the middle of a situation where we don't know what you're doing, would you remind us that you do and that we can trust you? God, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for these amazing baptisms and the pictures that they are and the families that they represent and the prayers that culminate in them. We pray over those children that you would write an incredible story with them. And we are so grateful that you already know what it is. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this morning. If you're joining us online, we're so glad you're doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. And I'm excited for this morning. And I know this section of the church here, that your general mentality is, yeah, the good part's over, so let's go, buddy. I'll try, okay? I'll try. I've got a lot to cover. I've got to see how adroitly I can move through all of the points and the stories in Moses' life, but we're going to drive to one large point today that I want us to see. This is the first Sunday in our summer-long series on the life of Moses. I think, what's it called? The Life and Journey of Moses. Wonderful. I tell the graphics department, which is Aaron and Carly, that this is what I'm going to preach about, and then they come up with the titles. So I never know what the series is called. We're going to spend 14 weeks in the life of Moses. And the reason we're going to do this is last year, I sat down with the staff and I wrote out all the books of the Bible and all the major characters of the Bible. And then we looked at the last five years worth of series and said, what are the gaps? What are the things that we haven't spent time on that we need to spend time on? And one of the most glaring ones was the life of Moses. And because of how impactful it is and how important it is in scripture. So this morning, rather than settling in on any particular instance in the life of Moses, I want to look at a bunch of them because I believe that they elicit a question. And just for the record, just so we know, Owen won the baptism contest. He did. He nailed it. That was great. I want us to move, we're going to do an overview of the life of Moses, move through and just kind of hit on different instances because Moses' life, more than any other life in the Bible, in my belief, more than any other account in the Bible, elicits a question more than any other story, more than any other person, more than any other life. You could say that Joseph is close, Moses' predecessor. You could say that David is close, but I don't think there's any other life in the Bible that elicits this question this much and kind of defines the story of Moses, which is simply this. God, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? What's going on right now? As we go through the life of Moses, you'll see this pop up again and again. God, I don't understand what you're doing right now. And in this way, I believe we can all relate to Moses because we have all at times asked that question, God, what are you doing? What's going on? I don't understand. When something's going wrong with our children and we don't know how to fix it, God, what are you doing? When someone gets sick and they aren't healed and we love them so much and they're so young, God, what are you doing? When there's big instances that happen, the big calamitous things that happen over and over again, it seems in the news, when wars happen, we say, God, this is not how I would do this. Like, God, what are you doing? When we're trying really hard to be parents and have a baby and we can't, God, what are you doing? And then when you miscarry a baby, God, what are you doing? And so I think many of us, if not all of us, have had a moment and probably a lot more than that in our life where we ask the fundamental question of the life of Moses, God, what are you doing? So what I want to do this morning is show you what I'm talking about. Show you these different instances where Moses or the nation or the people around Moses couldn't help but throw up their hands and say, God, why is this happening? What are you doing? What is going on? And we start it right out of the gate. If you have notes, you just have a list of scriptures on that note. So you can kind of see where I'm going to go. There's not a lot of blanks to fill in this morning, but you'll have the references and you can scratch the instances next to them if you want to, because I'm going to go through these and then I'm going to show you kind of what I believe is the point of all of these things. But right out of the gate, we see this verse, these verses in Exodus chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. So here's the context of this mama putting a baby in a basket and floating that basket down the river. The Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, somewhere between, scholars think it's somewhere between 200 and 400 years earlier, settled into Egypt. Because Joseph, one of the sons of Israel, Jacob, who was to become Israel, Abraham's grandson, ended up moving down to Egypt. It's a whole big thing, but he got in a position of big power. And because of his power and because of famine in the land, his family, his brothers, who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, moved down there too and settled in the land of Goshen, which is part of the land of Egypt. Then you fast forward. You turn the page from Genesis, which tells that story, among some others, but spends most of his time there. You turn the page from Genesis, and you get to Exodus. And in Exodus, what's going on is those Israelites have been there for generations. And the pharaohs that were favorable to them have gone, and there's new pharaohs. And now they're so numerous that the pharaoh at the time is worried that they would become so strong that they would be able to overtake the Egyptians and escape, and they wouldn't have their workforce anymore. So he tells the midwives, the Egyptian nurses that help with deliveries, if a woman has a girl, let the girl live. If the woman has a boy, take the boy's life to cut the male population of the Hebrew people. Well, Moses' mom was able to have him before the midwives got there. And so she was then hiding him, loving him, weaning him, caring for him. And eventually he started making too much noise as kids are wont to do. It did not take my kids three months to make too much noise, I'll tell you that. Eventually he started making too much noise and she realizes they're gonna find out about him and to come take him from me, and they're going to kill him. So the only thing she could do to save his life is put that baby in a basket and float that basket down the river. Just as an aside, I've preached a whole sermon about this on Mother's Day because I think that's what parenthood is. At the end of the day, you put your child in the basket, and you float it down the river, and you trust it to God, right? So she does that. And I can't help but think and be rather certain that during that season and during that time, with this is the kind of the real picture of it, not the personification of it, but a microcosm of it is, God, what are you doing right now? Why are you letting them kill our sons? God, why do I have to float my son down a river? So even Moses's life before he's even cognitive of what's happening around him starts with this question, God, what are you doing? Then we fast forward and we go to Exodus 2, 23 and 25. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. Preceding this verse, in the second half of chapter 2, is the account of the time that Moses came out of, I assume, the palace and was moving through the city, and he saw two Egyptian guards beating some Hebrew people. And he was inflamed with anger, and he went to protect them, and he ended up murdering these two guards. And this was seen by other people. And they reported him to the Egyptian guards. So now there's a price on his head and they're trying to actively arrest and kill Moses. So Moses has to flee. And he ends up fleeing to a place called Midian which was far enough away for him to not have to worry about the law anymore trying to get him. And he falls in with a guy named Jethro who has seven daughters. He marries one of the daughters, Zipporah, and he becomes a shepherd for 40 years. He's in the desert. Far away from the life that he had built and from the people that he knew. He had to flee. And at the end of this fleeing, the people cry out to God, what are you doing? What's going on with this slavery? And I can't help but wonder, this is speculation, you go here with me if you want to, but I can't help but wonder if they thought we had one voice in the palace that could advocate for us that Pharaoh might be sympathetic towards, and now he's just made a mistake and he's gone out into the wilderness. God, what are we doing? Who's going to save us? This is too much. This is too oppressive. And it says God heard their groanings and remembered his covenant with Abraham. Then very quickly in the narrative, we move to the next big scene in Moses's life, which is Moses and the burning bush. That's in Exodus three and four, two of, I think the best chapters in the Old Testament. And I'm not going to belabor this story because we're going to spend the next two weeks in that story. But Moses is in the desert. He's a shepherd. He's tending to his sheep. And he looks over and there's a bush that's on fire and it's not diminishing. And so he wanders over to check it out and the fire says to him, you're on holy ground, take off your shoes. And he's like, oh, this is God. And God says to him, I want you to go to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the known universe, and tell him to let his free workforce go. That's what he says. I want you to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. And so they have a back and forth. And we're going to get into this back and forth next week with Moses' five excuses that I think are pretty great. But the one that I think is most interesting and kind of most indicative of his struggle is in chapter 4, verse 10, where it says, Moses said to the Lord, pardon your servant, Lord.. And Moses says, but why me? I'm not eloquent. I never have been. I'm not silver-tongued. And beyond that, I just spent 40 years talking to sheep in the desert every day. And when he says I'm slow of speech and tongue, there are some Hebrew scholars that believe that that is indicative of a speech impediment, that he could have possibly had a stutter or something that would cause him to speak slowly and unevenly. He was not the man to go have political negotiations with the most powerful leader on the planet. So he says, why me, God? I'm slow of speech and of tongue. And God's response, if you read on, is, I will be adequate for you. I don't need you to be adequate. I will be adequate for you, so go. But it's like, then the question, and in the five excuses, God, what are you doing? You've got the wrong guy. Who's sending me? Well, I am sending you. Who should I say sent me? And God says, I'm not going to tell you my name. Why? What are you doing? He says, no one's going to trust me. And he said, I'll make them. Why? What are you doing? Every excuse is, God, what are you doing? But he goes faithfully, and he goes to Pharaoh, and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no chance. And then we have the famous ten plagues, right? The frogs and the locusts and the blood and the boils and all the things. We have the famous 10 plagues. And now we don't know how long of a period of time the plagues cover. Was there one a day for 10 days? Was there one a week for 10 weeks? It could have been months or maybe even years. There's not a lot of information to tell us what the span of time was during the plagues. But you've got to think that by the time they got to the 10th one, the growing question in everyone's brain was, God, what are you doing? These plagues ain't working, man. Pharaoh's not budging. God, what are you doing? And then the last one is, hey, I'm going to send the angel of death over the camp. And everyone who doesn't do a certain thing is going to lose their firstborn son. We see this in chapter 11, verse 1. Now the Lord said to Moses, I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here. One is, hey, the plagues aren't really working. So like what's going on, God? What's happening right now? And then the other one is, hey, what I want you to do for this particular plague to save your firstborn son is I wanted you to take the blood of a lamb, of a splatless lamb, and I want you to paint it on the doorposts of your house. And when the angel of death sees that perfect blood on the doorposts of your house, he will pass over, which is where we get the holiday Passover, he will pass over your house and move on to the next one. And I can't help but think that as Phil Leverett as the dad is out there the afternoon before Passover with the fresh blood from the lamb that he probably borrowed from Cam, that he's taking the blood of the lamb and putting it on his doorpost and saying, God, what are we doing? This doesn't make any sense. But okay, if this is what I have to do. The angel of death comes. There was great weeping and wailing in Egypt that night. The cry was great. And sure enough, Pharaoh drives them out. Says, okay, get out of here. You're a curse on our nation. Get lost. And here's a funny little detail from this story that I don't know if I'll be able to point out again. But all the housekeepers, all the women in Israel who were housekeepers of the rich Egyptian social class or whatever, they knew that they were going to be leaving the next day. So on their last day at work, they pilfered the Egyptians. And the Bible says, and so they plundered them. They took all their gold and all their silver. They just grabbed it all, put it in their dresses, and went home. And so they had some extra nickels on the trip to Israel. And I think that's funny. So they leave. They're driven out. They're in the desert. They've made their escape. And then they get pinned up against the banks of the Red Sea. And they cry out again. As Pharaoh approaches in chapter 14, verse 10, as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves? I love this sarcasm. Was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? So they're on the banks of the Red Sea. They have a choice to drown or to be slaughtered by Pharaoh's encroaching army. And they're bearing down on them. And they cry out and they look at Moses and they say, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? Did you bring us here because there's not enough graves in Egypt. Is that why you did this? Is that why you did all the plagues and all the things so that you could bring us here to die? What in the world, God, this doesn't make any sense. God, what are you doing? And then we know that God parts the Red Sea. They run through and the army is crushed, but they don't know that. So they're saying, what's going on? They're groaning. Why did you bring us here to die? It doesn't make any sense. But they get through. And they go. And then they're in the desert. And as they're in the desert, they're hungry. Because there's not much to eat. And there are, scholars will tell you that there were probably between 200,000 and 500,000 people moving through the desert. That's a logistic nightmare to feed. And so they're hungry. And they're calling out to God. And I can just imagine being a father watching my children be hungry every day, not sure if I was going to be able to get them food. And watching my wife sacrifice her food for them. I can only imagine how angry I would be. And how sad I would be. And how my sentiment would be, God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us out into the desert to starve? And so they cried out to God. And they complained to Moses and Aaron, and this in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I and the Lord your God. This is the genesis of manna, something that we probably have heard of before. And he says, tonight I'm going to let you eat quail. It's going to be a feast. But here's the deal. Don't get any more than you can eat. It's like when you take your kid to a buffet. Only get what you know you can eat. And their eyes get real big and you've got to try to figure it out. Only get what you know you can eat. Thank you for laughing at that joke. And then he said, the next morning there's going to be bread. But same rules apply. Don't store it. Don't be greedy. Only get what you need for that day. And so the next morning they wake up and there's these white flakes on the ground and they're like, what in the world is this? And they call it, and that's what manna means. What is it? And Moses says, that's the bread that the Lord has provided. God, what are you doing? We're hungry and we're starving. And why is it this weird bread that we can only take just enough of for the day? What's the harm in stockpiling bread? This doesn't make any sense, God. Why? What are you doing? Then they near the end of their journey in the desert. They're on the banks of the Jordan River. They're looking across the Jordan River at the promised land where Abraham lived and where Israel and his sons migrated from down into Egypt. And now, hundreds of years later, they've returned to claim their promised land. This is the land of milk and honey. The problem is there are now other peoples and tribes that occupy that land. And so Moses and Aaron collected 12 spies and sent them across the Jordan River. And they said, go scout the place out. Let's go figure out what we're dealing with and figure out how to conquer this territory because they knew they were going to have to conquer it. They couldn't just go to them and be like, hey, listen, there's been a big mistake. This is actually ours. So that's not going to work. So they're going to have to war over it. So they send the spies, and then the spies come back with this report in Numbers chapter 13, verses 26 through 29. They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the desert of Paran. There they reported to them and the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. They gave Moses this account. We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey. Here's its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in Negev, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan. I just want to say, I dare any of you guys to read those words out loud like that. I had to practice this morning. Thank you, Lord. One of the things that's interesting there is if you read below in the text, the sons of Anak were known to be descendants of giants. And so they were much larger men than the Hebrew people were. And so they come back and they go, yeah, that's the land of milk and honey. Here's the fruit. It's pretty amazing. God was right. He did a good job picking a good plot of land. The problem is there's powerful armies and powerful fortified cities and we can't go. God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us here to a promised land that we're supposed to take over that we've been journeying through the desert waiting on for 40 years now. And we can't even occupy the land because we don't have the strength to do it. God, what are you doing? Now, here's what I want to do. I'm going to go back through them very quickly. All of those instances where they said, God, what are you doing? And I'm going to tell you based on scripture, what God was doing. I'm going to tell you what I think he was up to, because I want us to see a much larger point. You go back to the very first instance of his mom floating that basket down the river. God, what are you doing? Well, I'll tell you what he's doing. He knows that Moses is going to be the first leader of his people that has to install civics and laws and leadership and war and generalizing and trade and negotiations. And there is nobody in the Hebrew community that has ever had any experience at that at all. So what does he do? He takes the future leader and he plants him right in the middle of the palace of the most powerful person in the world and gives him access to the greatest education in the world and gives him access to all the kinds of conversations that country leadership is going to require of him that he would have never had access to if he had stayed amongst the Hebrew people. So he was, God sent him to the palace, I believe with my whole heart, to be trained in a unique way that nobody else could. Then after he gets trained, okay, I'm ready, he murders two people and he gets sent out to the desert. And he stays in the desert for 40 years. God, what are you doing? You trained me up. I have to have a larger purpose than this. Moses doesn't know what he's been trained for yet, but I'm sure that he had an idea of his life that wasn't to flee everything that I know and the opulence of the palace and all the conveniences of life that I experience as this privileged kind of Egyptian Hebrew person. God, why am I here? Well, Moses had to be humbled. This happens over and over again in scripture. God calls Paul. Paul goes to the wilderness for seven years. God calls David to be king. David's on the run for 20 years being humbled. He calls Joseph to be the leader under the Egyptian people. Joseph is a prisoner for 20 years. It happens over and over and over again. And all of those times are instances of God humbling and shaping the character of the person that he intends to use, shaving off the rough edges. Clearly Moses was a hothead. He murdered two dudes. Clearly he didn't have the patience and the grace and the diplomacy to be a leader of a nation. And so God sent him to the desert to be molded and shaped and humbled. Then he calls Moses. And Moses says, you got the wrong guy. What are you doing? I stutter. And God says, hey, listen, you need to learn to depend on my adequacy, not your inadequacy. You're right. You are inadequate for the task. You are not the obvious choice. But I'm choosing you because, and you need to know right now, there's going to be a lot more instances where you're going to be inadequate for the task. And you're going to have to trust on my adequacy. He's teaching Moses to trust him. Then he goes to Pharaoh. And he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no. And then they have the plaguesagues and we go, what is going on with this? God, they're not working. And the last one works. And it's, they had to be saying, God, why this plague? This is pretty rough. This is pretty brutal. And why are you having me paint the blood of a lamb on a doorpost? I'll tell you why. Because if you were to go home right now and you were to take, let's just say Bayer, not like blood and, or DuPont, whatever your choice is, I don't care. And you took that and you were just painting a strip of it on the doorpost. You'd put it in the middle and you'd put it on the sides at about shoulder height. That's the perfect blood of a lamb in the shape of a cross. And by that blood, I will protect your firstborn son. Because God knows 4,000 years later, his firstborn son is going to hang on the cross and shed the blood of a perfect lamb. And by that blood, our firstborn sons are saved and all people are saved for all of time. It's a picture of what God is going to do there. He frees the people. They're at the banks of the Red Sea. God, what are you doing? Did you bring us out here to die? Are there not enough graves in Egypt? He parks the Red Sea. He runs them through it. He knew that Pharaoh and his anger and his frustration and his haste would trudge through the middle of the Red Sea too. And then he collapses the waters on the most powerful army in the world, ending the existential threat to his people. And they get through and they're hungry. Why did you bring us here if you're not going to feed us? So he says, I'm going to give you bread, but you can only take enough for each day. You can't be greedy with it. Why? Because Jesus is the bread of life. And 4,000 years later, he's going to come and live a perfect life and die a perfect death. And he's going to be sufficient for us. He's going to be all we need. We will never hunger or thirst again. Manna is a picture of Jesus and an assurance of God's provision for his people. And that's what he wants us to learn from it. Finally, they're at the banks of the Jordan River. They're about to approach the promised land. And they check it out. They can't do it. Ten of the spies said, no go. But Joshua and Caleb were men of faith. And they said, if this is where God wants us to go, we can. And they led the armies through Canaan under the power of God, conquering their way all the way through what we know of as Israel. And they settled in the promised land. And it's a picture of our promised land where we will ultimately go after our life's journey. And it is impossible for us to get there on their own, but through the power and the provision of God, he's made a way for all of us to enter that promised land. Do you understand that every instance in the life of Moses and what happens with the Hebrew people is an opportunity for God to show his sovereignty and his goodness. Here's what I want you to see from that. This one thing, this one assurance that I want us to keep locked in as we go through this series. God knew what he was doing then and he knows what he's doing now. God knew in every instance when they said, God, what are you doing? God knew. He rarely explained himself, but God knew. And he knew then what he was going to do, and he knows now what he's going to do. He knew their story when they didn't. And they said, God, why are you writing it this way? And he just thought, one day you'll see. You all have things in your life where you go, God, what are you doing? Why is this happening? And let me just tell you, God knows now why it's happening. And you might know later. But God knows now. We don't know. These wonderful kids that we baptize and these great families, we don't know where they're going to go. But God does. So there's going to be hardships in their life, and they're going to cause us to cry as parents and grandparents. And we're going to go, God, what are you doing? He knows now what he's doing. He knows then and he knows right now. So my hope as we go through this life of Moses, which puts on marvelous display the assuring and comforting sovereignty of God. My hope is that as we go through it, we'll see over and over again that God knew what was going on. God knew what he needed, and he's not just thinking generationally, he's thinking millennially. I don't know what's happening in your life. I don't know what stories he will write with you, but God does, and the story of Moses helps us to see that we can trust him. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your sovereignty. Thank you for our ability to rest in it if we would so choose. Thank you for the way that you weave the story of Moses and the Israelites and how you looked after them as a heavenly father in a way that you look after us. God, for those of us who are in the middle of a situation where we don't know what you're doing, would you remind us that you do and that we can trust you? God, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for these amazing baptisms and the pictures that they are and the families that they represent and the prayers that culminate in them. We pray over those children that you would write an incredible story with them. And we are so grateful that you already know what it is. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.
We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Well, good morning again. Thank you again for being here. This is my first Sunday back after having a kid, so I'm really grateful to be back in the saddle. I mean, I didn't do anything. Jen was primarily responsible for birthing the child. But yeah, so it's been a heck of a two weeks. For those who haven't seen, this is a picture of John. This is our boy. Yes, yes, I know. But before we go overboard with how cute he is, I am of the conviction that no child is actually cute until they've been alive for about three months. At the three-month mark, they become cute. At the newborn stage, they look like angry aliens, so we don't have to pretend like he's exceptionally cute, all right? But he's got blonde hair. He's a good-looking kid. We are excited about him. And I also wanted to thank Kyle for jumping in and preaching for us for two weeks. We had a plan leading into this series where we kind of acknowledged, you know, Nate, you're probably going to have to miss a couple of weeks somewhere in this faithful series because your baby is due. And I said, yeah. I said, so listen, when she goes into labor, I'm going to text you and you're teaching for the next two weeks. And he was like, all right, got it. So we had this plan in place, but neither of us expected to implement that plan almost three weeks prior to the due date. So he got the text on Friday morning and had to preach Sunday and I think did a remarkably good job. So thank you, Kyle, for doing that. And I'm glad to be back with you preaching about faithful women of the Bible. The woman that we're going to look at this morning is someone that I would be willing to bet that even though most of us probably know who she is, we might not know her name. It's a woman named Jochebed. And I had to actually look up what her name was, shamefully, because I know her story, but I didn't know her name. Her name is Jochebed, and Jochebed is probably the greatest mom of all time. If she's not the greatest, she's in the goat conversation. She's on the Mount Rushmore of moms, I think. And this isn't all the time the case, because sometimes excellent parents have children that just in their adulthood, they struggle. So it's not a one-to-one thing, but a lot of times you can tell the quality of a parent by the kids that they produce, right? And Jochebed produced some really good ones. From what we know, she had at least three children. She may have had more, but we know of three of them. One of them, her son, was a guy named Aaron. He was the first high priest of the nation of Israel. His staff was in the Ark of the Covenant. He is the one who performed a lot of the miracles that got the Israelites free of Egyptian enslavement. He instituted a lot of the religion that we still follow today. He had a profound impact on Israel in the Old Testament and continues to impact how we understand God to this day. I mentioned him in a sermon a couple of weeks ago when we were in Hebrews talking about Jesus as the great high priest. Aaron's a big deal. She had a daughter named Miriam. And most of us probably don't know about Miriam, but she was the first priestess in Israel. In a time when we didn't really know a lot about priestesses or that they even existed, but she was the first priestess in Israel. She actually wrote a praise song that's included in scripture, making her the first included female author in the Bible. And the praise song was just for the women of Israel. Men were not supposed to sing it, and it was about the conquest at God's faithfulness at the Red Sea, how God parted the sea and then defeated the armies of Egypt for them. She wrote that song, and it's included in the Bible. Those two kids are Jochebed's kids, and they did some really good stuff. Even if the third kid was a screw-up, she's still doing pretty good, right? The third kid was Moses. You may have heard of him. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, you're not really a church person, or you're listening or watching online, you wouldn't call yourself a church person. When I say Moses, you at least know who that is. You at least know, oh, that's a big deal Bible guy. Yeah. He freed the Hebrews from slavery. He led them through the desert. He established the religion. He came down with the Ten Commandments. It was the law of Moses. He wrote the first five books of the Bible. All three of these people, Aaron, Miriam, and Moses came from Jochebed's house. And so I want to know, what was she doing? What kind of Kool-Aid was she serving that produced these three incredible people that we still remember 6,000 years later? What was happening in her house that produced these types of adults. And I think if we can get some insight into that question, if we can get an answer there, then we can certainly apply that in our homes to our children, but I think that we'll pull out of it something that we can apply to all of life. So if we want to learn what it was like to grow up in Jacob's house, we don't have a ton of text. We don't get a lot of insight into her as a mother or as a person, really. We just get really one snippet at the beginning of Exodus in Exodus chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Or if you're at home, there's one on your phone. If you're in person, don't look at your phone. That will distract me. I'll think that you're totally bored and now you're on Twitter or something. So look at Exodus chapter 2. We're going to pick it up right at the beginning. Now what's happening here before I read the verses? The Hebrew people are slaves to the Egyptians. And someone, one of Pharaoh's advisors, got in his ear and was like, hey man, these Hebrews, there's a lot of them. We think that when they were wandering through the desert, archaeologists and theologians believed that it was somewhere around 500,000 people that made up the Hebrew nation. So this Egyptian advisor said, hey, there's a lot of them. We're a little bit worried if they continue to grow at the current rate that they could be so strong that if they decided to rebel against us, there could be an insurrection that we wouldn't be able to stop. So we need to do something about this burgeoning Hebrew civilization within our borders. We need to do something about this population. And so what they decided to do is to kill all the boys two years and younger, and the midwives, the ones delivering the babies, were instructed, if you deliver a baby boy, you have to kill it right away. This is just evil stuff, but this is what they did. And so there's a woman named Jochebed, and she's about to have a son. And this is a snippet that we get of her story in that context. In Exodus chapter 2, I'm going to pick it up in verse 1. It says, Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. That's just a tribe within the nation of Israel. This is the action that she took. And then if you continue to read the story, what you learn is she goes down to the river with this new boy, this three-month-old baby boy in a basket, and she sets it in the reeds. She sets it in the river, presumably the Nile River. And she sends her daughter, maybe Miriam, up as a lookout to see what happens to this basket. And somehow or another, she knew, I would presume that she knew the general schedule of the princess, of Pharaoh's daughter, and knew that she came out to bathe in the Nile River. And so she timed it up just right so that when she released Moses, that this basket would be encountered by the daughter of Pharaoh. And she had her daughter looking out to make sure that this is what happened. And sure enough, Pharaoh's daughter saw the basket. She had her servants grab it. They opened it up. There's a baby inside. She's moved by this and is compelled to adopt the baby. When she adopts Moses, they didn't have formula back then, all right? So she couldn't just mix something up and feed it to him. So she needed a woman who was capable of feeding a child at the time. So she tells her servants, go to the Hebrew people, find a woman who's able to feed a child right now and ask her to wean this child for me until they're off of it and then return. So they go into the Hebrew encampment and who do they find? Jochebed. Oh, what do you know? I can feed a kid. So she gets her son Moses back and gets those moments with him, those special months and probably years with him until it's time for him to be adopted officially into the palace by the princess of Egypt. The rest of the story from there, he grows up in this royal society. He learns how to lead. He gets the best education possible. He's exiled into the wilderness for 40 years. God speaks to him out of a burning bush. He comes back. He leads the people into freedom. That's the story of Moses. But as we look at the story of Jochebed here, can you imagine? Can you just imagine? Those of you who are parents, can you imagine having a baby? The moment John was born and they placed him on Jen's chest, I knew good and well, and it's not hyperbole, and you dads know what I'm talking about. I knew good and well I would die for that kid. Can you imagine taking the thing that is most precious to you in the world, putting it in a basket, and floating it down the river? Just releasing it and hoping that it works out. Having no control over what happened, having done all that you could do, and then setting this child in a basket and letting it go down the river. Can you imagine watching that basket like Jochebed did? But as I think about this story and the lessons that we can learn from this story, what I realized was the wisdom of Jacobad was that she did all that she could, and then she acknowledged it wasn't enough. She did all that she could, everything possible, and then she acknowledged, and that's still not enough. I think it's noteworthy that she got a basket, she wove it, she got the best bulrushes, and she put it together. She made it just for her kid. She made sure it was perfect. Then she coated it with bitumen and pitch. She made it waterproof. She took extra special care. She observed the schedule of the princess. She sent her daughter as a lookout. She did everything that she could. She controlled every detail that she could. She didn't just find any old basket. She didn't just set it in the river at any old time. She did everything that she could, but then at some point or another, she acknowledged something that I think we struggle so mightily to acknowledge. I've done everything that I can, and now I have to acknowledge that that's not enough. There's some mystical intersection between our effort and God's actions, between our effort and God's responsibility. And I think the lesson from Jochebed as I think about it more and more this week is yes, she did all that she could. Yes, she had faith, but she was able to accept this reality that there is a gap between our efforts and God's actions. And that in that gap, you have to admit, my efforts, my abilities are going to fall short. If she would have just sat there holding on to the basket and never released it, she would have waited too long and would have missed the opportunity. If she would have waited in the river with that basket up to the princess, she would have ruined it by being present when she found him. And if she would have given him to her daughter and said, walk the baby to the princess and ask, she would have ruined the opportunity. I can also imagine her waiting too deep into the river, holding on to the basket, refusing to let go of control, and I'm also going to acknowledge that at some point that's not going to be enough. It reminds me of this proverb that I've always loved. Proverbs chapter 21, verse 31. It says, the horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord. We can do everything we can to get the horse ready for battle. We can sharpen the sword. We can make sure the saddle's just right. We can know where the enemy is. We can approach the way we're supposed to approach. We can do everything we're going to do. But the battle belongs to the Lord. I can do the prep work. I can do everything I can do. But at some point or another, I have to hand the results over to God. And one of the reasons I love this story of Jochebed and the picture of her releasing that basket down the river is because as I was thinking about it one day, it occurred to me, isn't this just what parenthood is? Isn't parenthood just that moment over and over and over again where we've done everything we can and then at some point or another we have to release? A lot of you guys know this part of mine and Jen's story. We wanted a long time to be pregnant. We waited eight years to be pregnant and it was a hard eight years. And then when we finally did get pregnant, we found out about eight or 10 weeks in that we had miscarried. And that was hard. Maybe the hardest thing we've ever walked through as a couple. So when we got pregnant with Lily, I prayed so hard, God, please protect this child. Please don't let us walk through that again. Please, God, you've got to take care of us. And I would have done anything. I would have gotten three jobs. I would have never slept. Jen would have done anything. We would have put her on any diet, literally any injection. Whatever we can do to try to protect this baby that's growing inside of her, we will do it. But the reality is there was nothing we could do. We could do a couple things. We would be careful about a couple diets. But the reality was we had to pray. God, this child is yours. We believe you care about them and that you care about us. So we trust you with this pregnancy. And it occurred to me that this is what parenthood is. God, there's nothing left that I can do. I'm impotent here. But you care about us and you care about them, so we trust you. There was another reminder as we were having John during the process of labor and of waiting until it was really time to have the child. You know, there's contractions and things start to pick up in that process. And somewhere in that process, in the middle of the night, Jen's blood pressure began to drop and John's heart rate plummeted. And the nurses tried to pretend like it wasn't a big deal, but four of them rushed in there and started going really fast and dropping things and cussing. And one was trying to make light and like, like uneasy jokes. And me and Jen are scared. We're looking at each other. Our eyes are big. We don't know what to do. I can't even get near her to hold her hand because she's surrounded by nurses that are moving her around and they're giving her shots to try to do this and that and the other thing. And there's about 20 or 30 minutes where we were just scared. And all I could do is pray. And I was reminded of the story of Jochebed. We've done all that we can do. Now we pray. Now it's in the Lord's hands. And this is a picture of parenthood. One day, you do everything you can. You get them ready. You try to protect them. You try to choose the right school. But one day, you're going to let go of their hand, and they're going to walk into kindergarten, and you're not going to be with them for eight hours, and you don't know what's going to happen. One day, you entrust them to other dumb middle schoolers and the things that they're going to say and the stuff that's on their phones. There's coming a day, parents, many of us have experienced it already, where you watch them drive off. They drive away from home for the first time. They're 16 years old. They got their license. You can't control what happens in that car. You drop them off at college and hope they make wise choices. You walk them down the aisle and see them walk into a life that you won't live. You watch them have kids and wish them the best of luck. But parenthood is nothing if not a continual releasing of a basket down a river. Saying, God, I've done all that I can do. Now I trust you. And it's important to me to point something out here. And if I don't point this out, this could come across as like clumsy, ham-handed advice. Just trust God with your kids. Just trust God with the things in your life. Don't worry about it. Trust God. No, listen, she did everything that she could. She chose the perfect basket. She covered it with bitumen and pitch. She timed it out. She sent the lookout. She controlled everything that she could control. And so for your kids, because some of us are walking through some really serious things, and it would feel really clumsy to go, well, just trust God. We had a child this summer. It broke my heart to think about it. I think that they were four while they were walking through this. He choked on something really bad at dinner one night, really, really badly. Scared everybody in the family. Moms and nurse scared them to death. It traumatized him so badly that after that moment, he could no longer eat. He couldn't be convinced to put anything in his mouth and eat and swallow because he was scared of it. And they got treatment for it, and they did all the best things that they could. And eventually, eventually, he's able to start drinking smoothies, and then eventually, he was able to start eating things. And then, I was talking to his dad a couple of weeks ago. Then finally, they would give him something for dinner. And he was like, I can't eat that. I'm going to choke. And he's like, I saw you eat six chicken nuggets like an hour ago. So you're squared away, pal. Like then it became a thing where he was trying to get out of certain meals. But for a while, it was incredibly scary. And it would be super clumsy of me as a pastor to pick up the phone and call this couple and be like, I know that your child's having a hard time swallowing anything and is losing weight at a dangerous rate and is close to starving themselves, but just trust God with it. That's clumsy advice. Do everything that you can do. Get the best baskets. Get the best treatment. Call in the best experts. Go to the best practices. Get the best people associated with your children. Put in all the effort. Put in all the prayer. Rally all of your resources to do the best thing that you can do by your child. But be like Jacob and acknowledge that there's coming a moment where my efforts stop and God's actions begin. Do not hang on to that basket for too long. And do not trick yourself into believing that you can control the things that you can't control. So it's not just clumsy, trust God and everything will be okay. We don't just grab any old basket and throw the kid in the water anytime we want. Do everything that you can do, but acknowledge that there's coming a moment when you can't do anymore. And in that moment, choose to be like Jacob and trust God. And you know, I'm preaching about this, and sometimes I don't love to do parenting sermons because it doesn't hit everybody in the room. It hits a portion of the room. But I think that this one actually works for everyone because releasing things to God isn't just a practice for parenting. It's a necessary practice for all of life. This idea of preparing the horses for battle, but the victory is the Lord's. That's not just for raising children. That's for everything in life. Maybe you're in a marriage right now that has seen better years. Maybe it's getting really hard. And you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. You're not sure if your spouse is in it with you, but you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. This principle applies to that situation. Do everything that you can do. Get the best counseling that you can have. Have the hardest conversations that you need to have. Do the most introspection that you can do. Own the most in the relationship that you can own, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to admit that there comes an intersection with my efforts and God's actions, and you're going to have to trust that relationship to him. You're going to have to float that down the river and quit trying to control everything and trust that whatever needs to change in their heart, that God is going to change it if he's going to change it at all. With our careers, with what we want in life, with our goals, that interview that we really want to nail, the job that we really want to get, the account that we really want to close, the company that we really want to work for, the career that we really want to have, whatever it is that we're yearning and striving for, do all the work. Make the best possible basket, but at some point or another, trust that God cares about your career too and float it down the river and let him do with it what he's going to do. Those of us with aging parents, this is a hard reality. How do we take care of them? How do we do the right things? How do we know what to do? How do we know what to say? How do we know when to be forceful and when to back off and be respectful? How do we know when to take over? Do everything that you can do. Do everything that you know to do. But at some point or another, let go of the basket and let God take control of it. This applies, I think, to every area of life, to our finances, to our relationships, to everything that we do. Do everything that you can do. But just acknowledge, just know that at some point there's coming a time when your efforts will fall short and we will need God's actions to come in and trust those things to God. And if you're somebody who struggles with this, if you're anxious, just know that holding onto the basket too long could be the worst possible thing for it. If we go back to parenthood, think of the people that you know that have tried to control their child for too long and then release them into college and what happens? Because you couldn't release them sooner. Think about the people who probably should have put a little bit more bitumen on the basket. Maybe you should have picked a better basket. Maybe you should have been a little bit more thoughtful before you just slung that thing down the river. There's a downside to not doing everything that we can do. There's a downside to hanging on too long and to tricking ourselves into believing that we can continue to control things as we drown in the river ourselves and pull our basket of whatever's dear to us down with us. But I remember a couple years ago, I guess it was about 2018, we bought a house in April or in February of 2020. Praise God, because we couldn't buy a house right now. We started looking in 2018 for a house, and Jen was looking every day. I am convinced that between 2018 and 2020, there is no one who knew the North Raleigh real estate market better than Jen Rector. Not a soul on earth. I'm telling you, we'd be sitting there after dinner, and I'd be on my phone looking at Zillowow and I'd be like, oh, this house looks good. And she'd go, where is it? I'm like, it's over on like Diamond Hitch Trail. And she goes, oh, is that the green one or the brick one? I'm like, geez, the green one? She goes, yeah, it's got a great outdoor space, but I don't know about that kitchen. Okay, well, I guess we'll check that one off the list. Like she had this thing memorized, man. And we began to get concerned that we weren't going to be able to buy a house in North Raleigh because we really love this area. We really love North Raleigh. I didn't want to move to the outskirts. We really love it here. It was important to us to stay here. But it was really hard to find a house that we could afford and that we actually wanted. And we had a lot of conversations about, gosh, I'm not sure that this is gonna work out. Jen would be anxious that we're never gonna be able to buy a house or whatever. And one day it occurred to me and I just told her, I said, listen, I believe that God brought us to Raleigh. I believe that he actually cares about where we live. I believe that where we live matters to him and the community that he places us in matters to him. And because of that, we can trust him with this. Because we know that God cares about where we live, we can trust him with finding us a house. So we still did everything that we could do, but then one day he brought us a house that for us was perfect, is perfect. And I'm glad he did because no kidding around, if we would have waited another year to try to keep looking for this perfect house, I don't think that we could get into a house right now. And that's the encouragement that I would give you this morning. The thing that you're anxious about, the thing that you're trying to control, whether it's your kids or your career or your relationship or your finances or the things that you won't let go, that you're just latched onto this basket and you can't seem to release it to God or acknowledge that there's a place where your efforts need to stop and God's actions need to begin. If you're in that place, I would ask myself this question. Does God care about this? Does God care about this thing? If he does, then I can trust him with it. Does God care about this thing? If he does, I can trust him with it. Does God care about my kids? Absolutely he does, so I can trust him with them. Does God care about my marriage? Yes, deeply. It matters tremendously to him, so you can trust him with it. Does he care where you live? Yes. Does he care about your career? Yes. Does he care about your relationships? Yes. Does he care about your finances and your aging parents? Yes. He cares about all those things. So if God actually cares about this thing that matters so much to you, then I want you to know that you can trust him with that. His wisdom is greater than yours. His providence is better than yours. His strength is mightier than yours. His vision is further than yours. I think we have a lot to learn from the example of Jochebed. I don't know that this is the reason that she raised three incredible children, but I would be willing to bet that it's a big part of it. We all of us, especially those of us who are anxious, those of us who worry, those of us who stay up, worrying about all the different things that could possibly happen as we try to keep adding the perfect amount of bitumen and pitch and finding the perfect basket before we are willing to release it down the river to God. Let's acknowledge that this releasing, this principle of Jacobad, it really brings with it great peace. There is an incredible peace to watching something float away from you, knowing good and well, I've done all that I can. Have you done everything that you could? Yeah, I've done everything that I could. Now I'm giving it over to God. And what he does with it, I'm good with. There's an incredible peace to that. If we struggle with anxiety this morning, maybe what we need to do is finally release it and let the peace of God wash over us, knowing that if he cares about it, then he will take care of it. And in that way, I think we can all learn from the example of Jacob. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you this morning. We thank you for who you are and for what you do for us. Lord, I pray for the parents in the room. We struggle so mightily with relinquishing control of the children that you've given us. Would we acknowledge that we just simply can't control every detail? We're going to have to trust you in the conversations and in the spend the night parties and out on the road and at college and at school. We're going to have to trust that you care about those children too and that you will direct their paths. For those of us with other concerns, be it our finances or our careers or our relationships or our marriage, God, would we just be comforted by the fact that you care about those things too? Would we have the faith and the humility of Jochebed to do everything that we know to do, but at some point or another understand that our efforts are going to fall short and we need to entrust these things to your actions. Give us the strength and the peace to do that even today, Father. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Well, good morning again. Thank you again for being here. This is my first Sunday back after having a kid, so I'm really grateful to be back in the saddle. I mean, I didn't do anything. Jen was primarily responsible for birthing the child. But yeah, so it's been a heck of a two weeks. For those who haven't seen, this is a picture of John. This is our boy. Yes, yes, I know. But before we go overboard with how cute he is, I am of the conviction that no child is actually cute until they've been alive for about three months. At the three-month mark, they become cute. At the newborn stage, they look like angry aliens, so we don't have to pretend like he's exceptionally cute, all right? But he's got blonde hair. He's a good-looking kid. We are excited about him. And I also wanted to thank Kyle for jumping in and preaching for us for two weeks. We had a plan leading into this series where we kind of acknowledged, you know, Nate, you're probably going to have to miss a couple of weeks somewhere in this faithful series because your baby is due. And I said, yeah. I said, so listen, when she goes into labor, I'm going to text you and you're teaching for the next two weeks. And he was like, all right, got it. So we had this plan in place, but neither of us expected to implement that plan almost three weeks prior to the due date. So he got the text on Friday morning and had to preach Sunday and I think did a remarkably good job. So thank you, Kyle, for doing that. And I'm glad to be back with you preaching about faithful women of the Bible. The woman that we're going to look at this morning is someone that I would be willing to bet that even though most of us probably know who she is, we might not know her name. It's a woman named Jochebed. And I had to actually look up what her name was, shamefully, because I know her story, but I didn't know her name. Her name is Jochebed, and Jochebed is probably the greatest mom of all time. If she's not the greatest, she's in the goat conversation. She's on the Mount Rushmore of moms, I think. And this isn't all the time the case, because sometimes excellent parents have children that just in their adulthood, they struggle. So it's not a one-to-one thing, but a lot of times you can tell the quality of a parent by the kids that they produce, right? And Jochebed produced some really good ones. From what we know, she had at least three children. She may have had more, but we know of three of them. One of them, her son, was a guy named Aaron. He was the first high priest of the nation of Israel. His staff was in the Ark of the Covenant. He is the one who performed a lot of the miracles that got the Israelites free of Egyptian enslavement. He instituted a lot of the religion that we still follow today. He had a profound impact on Israel in the Old Testament and continues to impact how we understand God to this day. I mentioned him in a sermon a couple of weeks ago when we were in Hebrews talking about Jesus as the great high priest. Aaron's a big deal. She had a daughter named Miriam. And most of us probably don't know about Miriam, but she was the first priestess in Israel. In a time when we didn't really know a lot about priestesses or that they even existed, but she was the first priestess in Israel. She actually wrote a praise song that's included in scripture, making her the first included female author in the Bible. And the praise song was just for the women of Israel. Men were not supposed to sing it, and it was about the conquest at God's faithfulness at the Red Sea, how God parted the sea and then defeated the armies of Egypt for them. She wrote that song, and it's included in the Bible. Those two kids are Jochebed's kids, and they did some really good stuff. Even if the third kid was a screw-up, she's still doing pretty good, right? The third kid was Moses. You may have heard of him. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, you're not really a church person, or you're listening or watching online, you wouldn't call yourself a church person. When I say Moses, you at least know who that is. You at least know, oh, that's a big deal Bible guy. Yeah. He freed the Hebrews from slavery. He led them through the desert. He established the religion. He came down with the Ten Commandments. It was the law of Moses. He wrote the first five books of the Bible. All three of these people, Aaron, Miriam, and Moses came from Jochebed's house. And so I want to know, what was she doing? What kind of Kool-Aid was she serving that produced these three incredible people that we still remember 6,000 years later? What was happening in her house that produced these types of adults. And I think if we can get some insight into that question, if we can get an answer there, then we can certainly apply that in our homes to our children, but I think that we'll pull out of it something that we can apply to all of life. So if we want to learn what it was like to grow up in Jacob's house, we don't have a ton of text. We don't get a lot of insight into her as a mother or as a person, really. We just get really one snippet at the beginning of Exodus in Exodus chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Or if you're at home, there's one on your phone. If you're in person, don't look at your phone. That will distract me. I'll think that you're totally bored and now you're on Twitter or something. So look at Exodus chapter 2. We're going to pick it up right at the beginning. Now what's happening here before I read the verses? The Hebrew people are slaves to the Egyptians. And someone, one of Pharaoh's advisors, got in his ear and was like, hey man, these Hebrews, there's a lot of them. We think that when they were wandering through the desert, archaeologists and theologians believed that it was somewhere around 500,000 people that made up the Hebrew nation. So this Egyptian advisor said, hey, there's a lot of them. We're a little bit worried if they continue to grow at the current rate that they could be so strong that if they decided to rebel against us, there could be an insurrection that we wouldn't be able to stop. So we need to do something about this burgeoning Hebrew civilization within our borders. We need to do something about this population. And so what they decided to do is to kill all the boys two years and younger, and the midwives, the ones delivering the babies, were instructed, if you deliver a baby boy, you have to kill it right away. This is just evil stuff, but this is what they did. And so there's a woman named Jochebed, and she's about to have a son. And this is a snippet that we get of her story in that context. In Exodus chapter 2, I'm going to pick it up in verse 1. It says, Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. That's just a tribe within the nation of Israel. This is the action that she took. And then if you continue to read the story, what you learn is she goes down to the river with this new boy, this three-month-old baby boy in a basket, and she sets it in the reeds. She sets it in the river, presumably the Nile River. And she sends her daughter, maybe Miriam, up as a lookout to see what happens to this basket. And somehow or another, she knew, I would presume that she knew the general schedule of the princess, of Pharaoh's daughter, and knew that she came out to bathe in the Nile River. And so she timed it up just right so that when she released Moses, that this basket would be encountered by the daughter of Pharaoh. And she had her daughter looking out to make sure that this is what happened. And sure enough, Pharaoh's daughter saw the basket. She had her servants grab it. They opened it up. There's a baby inside. She's moved by this and is compelled to adopt the baby. When she adopts Moses, they didn't have formula back then, all right? So she couldn't just mix something up and feed it to him. So she needed a woman who was capable of feeding a child at the time. So she tells her servants, go to the Hebrew people, find a woman who's able to feed a child right now and ask her to wean this child for me until they're off of it and then return. So they go into the Hebrew encampment and who do they find? Jochebed. Oh, what do you know? I can feed a kid. So she gets her son Moses back and gets those moments with him, those special months and probably years with him until it's time for him to be adopted officially into the palace by the princess of Egypt. The rest of the story from there, he grows up in this royal society. He learns how to lead. He gets the best education possible. He's exiled into the wilderness for 40 years. God speaks to him out of a burning bush. He comes back. He leads the people into freedom. That's the story of Moses. But as we look at the story of Jochebed here, can you imagine? Can you just imagine? Those of you who are parents, can you imagine having a baby? The moment John was born and they placed him on Jen's chest, I knew good and well, and it's not hyperbole, and you dads know what I'm talking about. I knew good and well I would die for that kid. Can you imagine taking the thing that is most precious to you in the world, putting it in a basket, and floating it down the river? Just releasing it and hoping that it works out. Having no control over what happened, having done all that you could do, and then setting this child in a basket and letting it go down the river. Can you imagine watching that basket like Jochebed did? But as I think about this story and the lessons that we can learn from this story, what I realized was the wisdom of Jacobad was that she did all that she could, and then she acknowledged it wasn't enough. She did all that she could, everything possible, and then she acknowledged, and that's still not enough. I think it's noteworthy that she got a basket, she wove it, she got the best bulrushes, and she put it together. She made it just for her kid. She made sure it was perfect. Then she coated it with bitumen and pitch. She made it waterproof. She took extra special care. She observed the schedule of the princess. She sent her daughter as a lookout. She did everything that she could. She controlled every detail that she could. She didn't just find any old basket. She didn't just set it in the river at any old time. She did everything that she could, but then at some point or another, she acknowledged something that I think we struggle so mightily to acknowledge. I've done everything that I can, and now I have to acknowledge that that's not enough. There's some mystical intersection between our effort and God's actions, between our effort and God's responsibility. And I think the lesson from Jochebed as I think about it more and more this week is yes, she did all that she could. Yes, she had faith, but she was able to accept this reality that there is a gap between our efforts and God's actions. And that in that gap, you have to admit, my efforts, my abilities are going to fall short. If she would have just sat there holding on to the basket and never released it, she would have waited too long and would have missed the opportunity. If she would have waited in the river with that basket up to the princess, she would have ruined it by being present when she found him. And if she would have given him to her daughter and said, walk the baby to the princess and ask, she would have ruined the opportunity. I can also imagine her waiting too deep into the river, holding on to the basket, refusing to let go of control, and I'm also going to acknowledge that at some point that's not going to be enough. It reminds me of this proverb that I've always loved. Proverbs chapter 21, verse 31. It says, the horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord. We can do everything we can to get the horse ready for battle. We can sharpen the sword. We can make sure the saddle's just right. We can know where the enemy is. We can approach the way we're supposed to approach. We can do everything we're going to do. But the battle belongs to the Lord. I can do the prep work. I can do everything I can do. But at some point or another, I have to hand the results over to God. And one of the reasons I love this story of Jochebed and the picture of her releasing that basket down the river is because as I was thinking about it one day, it occurred to me, isn't this just what parenthood is? Isn't parenthood just that moment over and over and over again where we've done everything we can and then at some point or another we have to release? A lot of you guys know this part of mine and Jen's story. We wanted a long time to be pregnant. We waited eight years to be pregnant and it was a hard eight years. And then when we finally did get pregnant, we found out about eight or 10 weeks in that we had miscarried. And that was hard. Maybe the hardest thing we've ever walked through as a couple. So when we got pregnant with Lily, I prayed so hard, God, please protect this child. Please don't let us walk through that again. Please, God, you've got to take care of us. And I would have done anything. I would have gotten three jobs. I would have never slept. Jen would have done anything. We would have put her on any diet, literally any injection. Whatever we can do to try to protect this baby that's growing inside of her, we will do it. But the reality is there was nothing we could do. We could do a couple things. We would be careful about a couple diets. But the reality was we had to pray. God, this child is yours. We believe you care about them and that you care about us. So we trust you with this pregnancy. And it occurred to me that this is what parenthood is. God, there's nothing left that I can do. I'm impotent here. But you care about us and you care about them, so we trust you. There was another reminder as we were having John during the process of labor and of waiting until it was really time to have the child. You know, there's contractions and things start to pick up in that process. And somewhere in that process, in the middle of the night, Jen's blood pressure began to drop and John's heart rate plummeted. And the nurses tried to pretend like it wasn't a big deal, but four of them rushed in there and started going really fast and dropping things and cussing. And one was trying to make light and like, like uneasy jokes. And me and Jen are scared. We're looking at each other. Our eyes are big. We don't know what to do. I can't even get near her to hold her hand because she's surrounded by nurses that are moving her around and they're giving her shots to try to do this and that and the other thing. And there's about 20 or 30 minutes where we were just scared. And all I could do is pray. And I was reminded of the story of Jochebed. We've done all that we can do. Now we pray. Now it's in the Lord's hands. And this is a picture of parenthood. One day, you do everything you can. You get them ready. You try to protect them. You try to choose the right school. But one day, you're going to let go of their hand, and they're going to walk into kindergarten, and you're not going to be with them for eight hours, and you don't know what's going to happen. One day, you entrust them to other dumb middle schoolers and the things that they're going to say and the stuff that's on their phones. There's coming a day, parents, many of us have experienced it already, where you watch them drive off. They drive away from home for the first time. They're 16 years old. They got their license. You can't control what happens in that car. You drop them off at college and hope they make wise choices. You walk them down the aisle and see them walk into a life that you won't live. You watch them have kids and wish them the best of luck. But parenthood is nothing if not a continual releasing of a basket down a river. Saying, God, I've done all that I can do. Now I trust you. And it's important to me to point something out here. And if I don't point this out, this could come across as like clumsy, ham-handed advice. Just trust God with your kids. Just trust God with the things in your life. Don't worry about it. Trust God. No, listen, she did everything that she could. She chose the perfect basket. She covered it with bitumen and pitch. She timed it out. She sent the lookout. She controlled everything that she could control. And so for your kids, because some of us are walking through some really serious things, and it would feel really clumsy to go, well, just trust God. We had a child this summer. It broke my heart to think about it. I think that they were four while they were walking through this. He choked on something really bad at dinner one night, really, really badly. Scared everybody in the family. Moms and nurse scared them to death. It traumatized him so badly that after that moment, he could no longer eat. He couldn't be convinced to put anything in his mouth and eat and swallow because he was scared of it. And they got treatment for it, and they did all the best things that they could. And eventually, eventually, he's able to start drinking smoothies, and then eventually, he was able to start eating things. And then, I was talking to his dad a couple of weeks ago. Then finally, they would give him something for dinner. And he was like, I can't eat that. I'm going to choke. And he's like, I saw you eat six chicken nuggets like an hour ago. So you're squared away, pal. Like then it became a thing where he was trying to get out of certain meals. But for a while, it was incredibly scary. And it would be super clumsy of me as a pastor to pick up the phone and call this couple and be like, I know that your child's having a hard time swallowing anything and is losing weight at a dangerous rate and is close to starving themselves, but just trust God with it. That's clumsy advice. Do everything that you can do. Get the best baskets. Get the best treatment. Call in the best experts. Go to the best practices. Get the best people associated with your children. Put in all the effort. Put in all the prayer. Rally all of your resources to do the best thing that you can do by your child. But be like Jacob and acknowledge that there's coming a moment where my efforts stop and God's actions begin. Do not hang on to that basket for too long. And do not trick yourself into believing that you can control the things that you can't control. So it's not just clumsy, trust God and everything will be okay. We don't just grab any old basket and throw the kid in the water anytime we want. Do everything that you can do, but acknowledge that there's coming a moment when you can't do anymore. And in that moment, choose to be like Jacob and trust God. And you know, I'm preaching about this, and sometimes I don't love to do parenting sermons because it doesn't hit everybody in the room. It hits a portion of the room. But I think that this one actually works for everyone because releasing things to God isn't just a practice for parenting. It's a necessary practice for all of life. This idea of preparing the horses for battle, but the victory is the Lord's. That's not just for raising children. That's for everything in life. Maybe you're in a marriage right now that has seen better years. Maybe it's getting really hard. And you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. You're not sure if your spouse is in it with you, but you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. This principle applies to that situation. Do everything that you can do. Get the best counseling that you can have. Have the hardest conversations that you need to have. Do the most introspection that you can do. Own the most in the relationship that you can own, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to admit that there comes an intersection with my efforts and God's actions, and you're going to have to trust that relationship to him. You're going to have to float that down the river and quit trying to control everything and trust that whatever needs to change in their heart, that God is going to change it if he's going to change it at all. With our careers, with what we want in life, with our goals, that interview that we really want to nail, the job that we really want to get, the account that we really want to close, the company that we really want to work for, the career that we really want to have, whatever it is that we're yearning and striving for, do all the work. Make the best possible basket, but at some point or another, trust that God cares about your career too and float it down the river and let him do with it what he's going to do. Those of us with aging parents, this is a hard reality. How do we take care of them? How do we do the right things? How do we know what to do? How do we know what to say? How do we know when to be forceful and when to back off and be respectful? How do we know when to take over? Do everything that you can do. Do everything that you know to do. But at some point or another, let go of the basket and let God take control of it. This applies, I think, to every area of life, to our finances, to our relationships, to everything that we do. Do everything that you can do. But just acknowledge, just know that at some point there's coming a time when your efforts will fall short and we will need God's actions to come in and trust those things to God. And if you're somebody who struggles with this, if you're anxious, just know that holding onto the basket too long could be the worst possible thing for it. If we go back to parenthood, think of the people that you know that have tried to control their child for too long and then release them into college and what happens? Because you couldn't release them sooner. Think about the people who probably should have put a little bit more bitumen on the basket. Maybe you should have picked a better basket. Maybe you should have been a little bit more thoughtful before you just slung that thing down the river. There's a downside to not doing everything that we can do. There's a downside to hanging on too long and to tricking ourselves into believing that we can continue to control things as we drown in the river ourselves and pull our basket of whatever's dear to us down with us. But I remember a couple years ago, I guess it was about 2018, we bought a house in April or in February of 2020. Praise God, because we couldn't buy a house right now. We started looking in 2018 for a house, and Jen was looking every day. I am convinced that between 2018 and 2020, there is no one who knew the North Raleigh real estate market better than Jen Rector. Not a soul on earth. I'm telling you, we'd be sitting there after dinner, and I'd be on my phone looking at Zillowow and I'd be like, oh, this house looks good. And she'd go, where is it? I'm like, it's over on like Diamond Hitch Trail. And she goes, oh, is that the green one or the brick one? I'm like, geez, the green one? She goes, yeah, it's got a great outdoor space, but I don't know about that kitchen. Okay, well, I guess we'll check that one off the list. Like she had this thing memorized, man. And we began to get concerned that we weren't going to be able to buy a house in North Raleigh because we really love this area. We really love North Raleigh. I didn't want to move to the outskirts. We really love it here. It was important to us to stay here. But it was really hard to find a house that we could afford and that we actually wanted. And we had a lot of conversations about, gosh, I'm not sure that this is gonna work out. Jen would be anxious that we're never gonna be able to buy a house or whatever. And one day it occurred to me and I just told her, I said, listen, I believe that God brought us to Raleigh. I believe that he actually cares about where we live. I believe that where we live matters to him and the community that he places us in matters to him. And because of that, we can trust him with this. Because we know that God cares about where we live, we can trust him with finding us a house. So we still did everything that we could do, but then one day he brought us a house that for us was perfect, is perfect. And I'm glad he did because no kidding around, if we would have waited another year to try to keep looking for this perfect house, I don't think that we could get into a house right now. And that's the encouragement that I would give you this morning. The thing that you're anxious about, the thing that you're trying to control, whether it's your kids or your career or your relationship or your finances or the things that you won't let go, that you're just latched onto this basket and you can't seem to release it to God or acknowledge that there's a place where your efforts need to stop and God's actions need to begin. If you're in that place, I would ask myself this question. Does God care about this? Does God care about this thing? If he does, then I can trust him with it. Does God care about this thing? If he does, I can trust him with it. Does God care about my kids? Absolutely he does, so I can trust him with them. Does God care about my marriage? Yes, deeply. It matters tremendously to him, so you can trust him with it. Does he care where you live? Yes. Does he care about your career? Yes. Does he care about your relationships? Yes. Does he care about your finances and your aging parents? Yes. He cares about all those things. So if God actually cares about this thing that matters so much to you, then I want you to know that you can trust him with that. His wisdom is greater than yours. His providence is better than yours. His strength is mightier than yours. His vision is further than yours. I think we have a lot to learn from the example of Jochebed. I don't know that this is the reason that she raised three incredible children, but I would be willing to bet that it's a big part of it. We all of us, especially those of us who are anxious, those of us who worry, those of us who stay up, worrying about all the different things that could possibly happen as we try to keep adding the perfect amount of bitumen and pitch and finding the perfect basket before we are willing to release it down the river to God. Let's acknowledge that this releasing, this principle of Jacobad, it really brings with it great peace. There is an incredible peace to watching something float away from you, knowing good and well, I've done all that I can. Have you done everything that you could? Yeah, I've done everything that I could. Now I'm giving it over to God. And what he does with it, I'm good with. There's an incredible peace to that. If we struggle with anxiety this morning, maybe what we need to do is finally release it and let the peace of God wash over us, knowing that if he cares about it, then he will take care of it. And in that way, I think we can all learn from the example of Jacob. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you this morning. We thank you for who you are and for what you do for us. Lord, I pray for the parents in the room. We struggle so mightily with relinquishing control of the children that you've given us. Would we acknowledge that we just simply can't control every detail? We're going to have to trust you in the conversations and in the spend the night parties and out on the road and at college and at school. We're going to have to trust that you care about those children too and that you will direct their paths. For those of us with other concerns, be it our finances or our careers or our relationships or our marriage, God, would we just be comforted by the fact that you care about those things too? Would we have the faith and the humility of Jochebed to do everything that we know to do, but at some point or another understand that our efforts are going to fall short and we need to entrust these things to your actions. Give us the strength and the peace to do that even today, Father. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
